G. Dem. Teodorescu
[2] In 1868, a few months prior to obtaining his high school degree, he was hired as a civil servant at the Religious Affairs and Education Ministry, meanwhile working on two publications by V. A. Urechia.
Near the end of the year, he left government and was hired at Românul newspaper, where he worked as proofreader, reporter, translator (until 1870), editing secretary and contributor (through 1872) and editor (until 1875).
Although exempt from military service as the only son of a widow, he joined the militia organized by General Ion Emanuel Florescu, rising to the rank of sergeant.
In 1874–1875, the faculty was joined by Odobescu and Bogdan Petriceicu Hasdeu, who offered free courses on, respectively, archaeology and comparative philology.
[8] His professors included Émile Egger, Georges Perrot, Eugène Benoist, Benjamin-Constant Martha and Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges.
He continued gathering genre texts sent by friends from home, and sent articles to Hasdeu's Columna lui Traian, as well as to Convorbiri Literare.
[7] Upon his return from France, he was hired as substitute teacher at Saint Sava High School, in the Romanian and Latin department of the advanced section; the permanent position had fallen vacant upon the death of I. C. Massim.
He was also appointed commander in the Civic Guard, an institution tasked with maintaining public order while the regular army was fighting in the Romanian War of Independence.
Drawing on his Paris experience, he employed comparative techniques and worked with glossaries by Hungarian, German and British writers that included Romanian proverbs.
In May, he joined a mission to Constantinople as secretary to diplomat Dimitrie Brătianu, charged with negotiating in regard to Ottoman prisoners held by the Romanian Army.
He emphasized the carols' Latin, pagan roots; observed their depiction of customs, their allusions to historical events such as Genoese and Venetian traders' presence on the Black Sea, and their insight into the feudal mindset.
His Tratat de versificare latină, which appeared the same year, was the first Romanian-language treatise of Latin prosody; part two, dealing with meter, came out in 1880.
[11] In August 1883, while he was taking a mineral bath treatment at Lacu Sărat, he met Petrea Crețu Șolcan, a septuagenarian lăutar from Brăila who would become his chief source of ballads.
He subsequently published his lecture in brochure form, making him the second Romanian to devote a study to a single interpreter (Atanasie Marian Marienescu had done so in 1866), and the first to write about a lăutar.
[14] Poezii populare române, Teodorescu's magnum opus and the culmination of a two-decade folklore collecting activity, was published in autumn 1885.
Hasdeu objected that he merely deserved a thousand lei: the award, he noted, was for "meaningful intellectual activity", while the money prize went to those who had shown "only a great dose of persistence or material labor".
[22] In early 1897, he entered a competition to become professor in the new history of Romanian language and literature department of Bucharest University; he eventually lost to Ovid Densusianu in mid-1898.
[25] In 1901, a committee was formed to raise funds for a bronze sculpture of Teodorescu; this was completed the following year by Carol Storck and unveiled in the Athenaeum garden.
The year 1902 also saw the appearance of a memorial book written by his friends; it included a biography and bibliography, as well as funeral orations by, among others, Constantin Banu and Rădulescu-Motru.
[27] Between 1902 and 1944, critical commentary on Teodorescu amounted only to paragraphs or a few pages in the works of Densusianu, Iorga, Dimitrie Gusti, Grigore Tocilescu, Lazăr Șăineanu, Dumitru Caracostea, Duiliu Zamfirescu and George Călinescu.
It was in 1944 that Ovidiu Papadima delivered a lecture on Teodorescu's life and work for Radiodifuziunea Română, subsequently publishing it in Revista Fundațiilor Regale.
